The development of complex military equipment traditionally has been based on a rigid, top-down approach, originating with a publication of a customer operational requirements document. A prime contractor decomposes the operational requirements document to allocate requirements across the weapon system level, which in turn are further decomposed and allocated across the subsystem and component levels. This top-down, hierarchical approach ensures that customer requirements are reflected in lower-level components and become integral to an objective weapon system design. This approach, however, does very little to optimally allocate limited resources across a weapon system design, and objective characteristics of an operational design often exceed program constraints. In addition to suboptimized designs, the top-down approach often leads to misallocated development resources and development processes that are incapable of rapidly responding to inevitable changes in operational, fiscal, and technological considerations.
Customer recognition of the above-described dilemmas, the realities of tight fiscal budgets, and changes in the geopolitical climate during the past decade have had a noticeable philosophical effect on how future weapon systems will be developed and procured. The development of future weapon systems will be cost constrained so that a weapon system's capabilities will be partially determined by a customer's ability to procure funding. In addition, most forces are no longer forward deployed, but instead are forward deployable. The ability to project force around the world, and the ability to sustain a force outside a customer's sovereign territory, has placed a tremendous burden on the logistical and tactical operations of customers. With respect to naval gun systems involved in indirect fire engagement, ships must be capable of rapidly reaching a destination or target area and engaging in a live fire exercise with limited collateral damage to a civilian population and structures nearby the targets. Moreover, sequentially fired munitions or munitions fired from multiple guns must be capable of reaching a target area as a coordinated delivery for maximum combat effectiveness.
Because of these fiscal and geopolitical changes, some customers have established a mission need and a partial list of non-negotiable, operational requirements for future weapon systems. These customers also have requested prospective weapon system developers to design, develop, and demonstrate credible simulated modeling approaches to satisfying operational weapon system requirements and to developing weapon system designs that allocate constrained resources while optimizing performance according to specified measures of effectiveness.
Previous efforts to develop software for weapon systems have focused on stand alone simulation software or software that provides analysis at the subsystem or component level only, because methods such as the above-described top-down approach were used to manage the overall design and development process. For example, R. Carnes et al., U.S. Pat. No. 4,926,362, Airbase Sortie Generation Analysis Model (ABSGAM), describes a computer simulation model for analyzing the sortie generation capabilities and support requirements of air vehicle designs and for performing effectiveness analyses on these designs. The model cannot be used to allocate resources across a system or various subsystems or components of a design nor used concurrently and interactively with design work. Another similar invention is described by R. Adams, U.S. Pat. No. 5,415,548, System and Method for Simulating Targets for Testing Missiles and Other Target Driven Devices.
It would be advantageous to have an evaluation and simulation system that functions integrally and interactively with the conceptualization, design, and development of weapon systems, and particularly advanced naval gun systems, under conditions whereby design concepts can be analyzed, constrained resources can be allocated across a weapon system architecture in a manner that optimizes the weapon system's combat effectiveness, and a virtual representation of the weapon system can be tested under simulated combat conditions for combat effectiveness. Moreover, it would be advantageous if a user of such an evaluation and simulation system could establish performance levels for operational, system, subsystem, and component requirements while optimizing the advanced naval gun system's effectiveness and satisfying the resource constraints.